Top 15 Favorite Best Actress-Winning Performances

Throughout this month, I have decided to do a series of Oscar-related articles in antecipation to tonight's 89th Academy Awards ceremony, which I am going to see live o television. Yesterday, I presented you my top 15 favorite Best Actor-winning performances (from 1929 to 2015), so today I thought I would do the same, but for Best Actress winners instead. As I have said before, please bear in mind that this is my own personal opinion, which of course is limited to the films I have seen so far.

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#15: Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce

in Mildred Pierce (1945)

Mildred Pierce: I was always in the kitchen. I felt as though I'd been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life, except for the few hours it took to get married.

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#14: Joan Fontaine as Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth

in Suspicion (1941)

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: I must go now or I'll be late to luncheon. Anyway, if my father saw me come in both late and beautiful, he might have a stroke.

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#13: Elizabeth Taylor as Martha

in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Martha: I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster. I'm not!

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#12: Olivia de Havilland as Jody Norris

in To Each His Own (1946)

Jody Norris: When you've been widly and deeply in love, Mac, you don't stop loving just because somebody dies. Certainly not if there's a child. It's the same love.

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#11: Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy

in The Blind Side (2009)

Beth: You're changing that boy's life.
Leigh Anne Tuohy: No, he's changing mine.

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#10: Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara

in Gone with the Wind (1939)

Scarlett O'Hara: As God as my witness, I shall never go hungry again.

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#9: Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles

in Cabaret (1972)

Sally Bowles: That's me, darling. Unusual places, unusual love affairs. I am a most strange and extraordinary person.

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#8: Claudette Colbert as Ellen «Ellie» Andrews

in It Happened One Night (1934)

Ellen «Ellie» Andrews: I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.

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#7: Kate Winslet as Hanna Schmitz

in The Reader (2008)

Hanna Schmitz: It doesn't matter what I feel. It doesn't matter what I think. The dead are still dead.

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#6: Brie Larson as Joy Newsome

in Room (2015)

Joy Newsome: I'm sorry that I'm not nice anymore, but you know what? Maybe if your voice saying «be nice» hadn't been in my head, then maybe I wouldn't have helped the guy with the sick dog! 

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#5: Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany Maxwell

in Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Tiffany Maxwell: Humanity is just nasty and there's no silver lining.

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#4: Marion Cotillard as Édith Piaf

in La Vie en Rose (2007)

Édith Piaf: I can't? Then what's the point of being Édith Piaf?

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#3: Audrey Hepburn as Princess Ann

in Roman Holiday (1953)

Princess Ann: I've never been alone with a man before, even with my dress on. With my dress off, it's MOST unusual.

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#2: Jane Wyman as Belinda MacDonald

in Johnny Belinda (1948)

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#1: Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn

in Born Yesterday (1950)

Billie Dawn: [My father] always used to say, «Never do nothing you wouldn't want printed on the front page of The New York Times.»

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And there you have it. These are, as of now, my top 15 favorite Best Actress-winning performances. Did I name some of your favorites? Were you surprised by my choices?